Advice for graduate students on staying organized. This is also valuable information for faculty, too. One of the things I’ve found since I became faculty is that the old system of note-taking I developed as a student (using a legal pad+manilla folders) doesn’t really work all that well for me anymore. Instead, I now tote around a Moleskine notebook and just keep everything in it. Interestingly, I find that I’m able to find stuff remarkably quickly in it—so much so that people will ask a question about a meeting several weeks ago and I can turn right to the page containing those notes. I’m not a GTD guy; I find that those pre-fab systems don’t work well for me. A while back, a friend set me up with an “inbox”—the shibboleth of the GTD system. Inboxes work great, I think, if they can contain things that can be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. But my job routinely requires me to live six months ahead, and I get documents that I need to deal with, but often not for weeks or months. The result is that within 2 weeks, my inbox was a foot tall with things I needed to deal with in upcoming months but could not deal with immediately. Or even in a reasonable amount of time.
3/26/2007